The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote a column on Monday titled “Heritage’s ugly Benghazi panel,” portraying a forum held the same day at the Heritage Foundation — hosted by the newly formed Benghazi Accountability Coalition – as nothing more than an anti-Islamic hate-fest. This was a serious panel with numerous, widely recognized experts, a couple of whom were also members of Accuracy in Media’s Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. CCB’s April report, “How America Switched Sides in the War on Terror,” made international headlines.

That report took some serious skin. Diane Sawyer, Bob Woodward, and other stalwarts of the mainstream media have taken Hillary Clinton to task over Benghazi. With Heritage and others now picking up the baton, something clearly needed to be done. They can’t have Hillary’s chances in 2016 threatened by that Benghazi “old news.” As Hillary herself said, “What difference, at this point, does it make!?”

Enter Dana Milbank, WaPo’s hit “journalist,” who sees Joseph McCarthy and racist bigots behind every conservative door. He could not, and did not, dispute the facts raised during this afternoon-long forum. Instead, he used a now-standard device of the left when confronted with uncomfortable truths. The discussion and topic was discredited by simply describing what was said in a presumptuous and mocking tone. It is a clever way to discredit facts in the reader’s mind without actually disputing the facts. So, for example, he wrote:

The session, as usual, quickly moved beyond the specifics of the assaults that left four Americans dead to accusations about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating the Obama administration, President Obama funding jihadists in their quest to destroy the United States, Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton attempting to impose Shariah blasphemy laws on Americans and Al Jazeera America being an organ of ‘enemy propaganda.’

Most of the above, of course, is true. President Obama did fund the Libyan opposition, which was known to have al Qaeda ties; and those same jihadists turned around and attacked the Benghazi Special Mission Compound, killing Americans. He blatantly supported the Muslim Brotherhood in the misnamed Egyptian “Arab Spring” where one of America’s most reliable Muslim allies, Hosni Mubarak, was deposed.

Obama and Clinton are certainly doing nothing to stop the spread of Shariah in America, and the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the Obama administration. Another report out Monday quoted Mohamed Elibiary, an advisor to the Homeland Security Department and Muslim Brotherhood supporter, writing in a tweet, “As I’ve said b4, inevitable that ‘Caliphate’ returns…” Finally, anyone even remotely familiar with Al Jazeera knows it is an Islamist propaganda organ. The fact that it occasionally does a better job of reporting news than the American mainstream media is simply a reflection of just how bad the American media have become.

But apparently, Milbank’s job is not to delve into the facts. Instead, his job is to discredit Obama’s detractors. So he used another standard leftist device as well. He found a convenient straight man to play the victim, innocently asking questions and making statements designed to provoke a predictable response, which could then be attacked with the usual leftist rhetoric. In this case, he utilized a Muslim woman named Saba Ahmed. He wrote, “Saba Ahmed, an American University law student, stood in the back of the room and asked a question in a soft voice…” He quoted her as saying:

We portray Islam and all Muslims as bad, but there’s 1.8 billion followers of Islam… We have 8 million-plus Muslim Americans in this country and I don’t see them represented here.

So, of course, the fact that the forum was not packed with Muslims implies it had to be biased. Substitute “white privilege,” “racism,” “McCarthyism,” or any of the other familiar leftist shibboleths. If you can’t discredit the message, smear the messengers. Ahmed also performed another, perhaps more important, service; she changed the subject away from the disaster that was Benghazi and forced the panel to make it all about her bogus concerns.